Critic's Pick

Trisha Brown retrospective will lift off at UCLA and beyond

Trisha Brown in her New York studio in 1997. (Mitsu Yasukawa / For the…)

The point — or at least one point — of Trisha Brown’s dance is that it can’t be pinned down. Literally or metaphorically.

She has always liked, for instance, to leave the ground.

So, along with two programs in Royce Hall on Friday and Sunday that are focal points of the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA's Trisha Brown retrospective, some seminal site-specific pieces will be held around the Westside.

A man will walk down the side of the Broad Art Center on the UCLA campus at 6 p.m. Friday, re-creating an event that startled New Yorkers 40 years ago in SoHo; roof dance pieces will be presented Saturday afternoon at the Getty Center; and “Floor of the Forest” is an ongoing daily event Thursdays through Sundays at the Hammer Museum.

But the greatest range of Brown, who happened to be a pioneer of postmodern dance, will be found in the Royce repertory. It surveys not only the huge range of her movement language, but of her artistic interests — be it French Baroque opera, a Sousa march or avant-garde music, as well as her collaborations with such artists as Laurie Anderson, Robert Rauschenberg and Donald Judd.